Terrorist Trial in New York...
Call of Duty...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
'V'
The original 'V' miniseries was an interesting but severely flawed bit of sci-fi paranoia that lifted its central, defining image (a massive flying saucer hovering over a city) from Arthur C. Clarke's chilly evolution-is-progressive classic novel Childhood's End. By the time the second miniseries came around, humans on horseback were outrunning spaceships, and the short-lived series just made things worse -- and diluted creator Ken Johnson's 'aliens as Nazis/Soviets' central metaphor.
The new 'V' gets one thing very right -- it's got a terrific cast, led by Elizabeth Mitchell as a Visitor-fighting FBI agent, Morris Chestnut as a good, rogue alien, Morena Baccharin as alien High Commander 'Anna' and Scott Wolf as a smarmy but smarter than he looks TV anchorman. The rest of it is compromised by a couple of dumb ideas that scientists in the universe of the show would have immediately jumped on, chief among them the ridiculous premise that aliens with gigantic interstellar spaceships would need to go to a planet to pick up water, a bit of idiocy that's also showed up on Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe and Star Trek: Voyager, to name just three. Obviously the aliens aren't really here to drink our water, but the show should at least address the fact that a billion scientists would call 'bullshit' on this pretext.
Other problems? Well, are we really going to believe that aliens, even aliens that look exactly like us, are going to have names like 'Anna' and 'Lisa'? Or that aliens going to break up a resistance cell are going to follow up their nifty little floating bomb with...crowbars and knives? Who are these guys, Vinnie and the Jets? The attack on the resistance cell is a good scene in the pilot, though I enjoyed it more when it was a scene in Stephen King's "The Ten O'Clock People."
A lot of the problems of the show can be ironed out. My overarching complaint is that the show revealed the perfidy of the aliens way, way, way too early -- about 35 minutes into the pilot. That pretty much eliminated any suspense attached to 'are they or aren't they?' and dumped it all on 'what are they up to and how do we stop it?' It's as if the X-Files series finale was its pilot.
The new 'V' gets one thing very right -- it's got a terrific cast, led by Elizabeth Mitchell as a Visitor-fighting FBI agent, Morris Chestnut as a good, rogue alien, Morena Baccharin as alien High Commander 'Anna' and Scott Wolf as a smarmy but smarter than he looks TV anchorman. The rest of it is compromised by a couple of dumb ideas that scientists in the universe of the show would have immediately jumped on, chief among them the ridiculous premise that aliens with gigantic interstellar spaceships would need to go to a planet to pick up water, a bit of idiocy that's also showed up on Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe and Star Trek: Voyager, to name just three. Obviously the aliens aren't really here to drink our water, but the show should at least address the fact that a billion scientists would call 'bullshit' on this pretext.
Other problems? Well, are we really going to believe that aliens, even aliens that look exactly like us, are going to have names like 'Anna' and 'Lisa'? Or that aliens going to break up a resistance cell are going to follow up their nifty little floating bomb with...crowbars and knives? Who are these guys, Vinnie and the Jets? The attack on the resistance cell is a good scene in the pilot, though I enjoyed it more when it was a scene in Stephen King's "The Ten O'Clock People."
A lot of the problems of the show can be ironed out. My overarching complaint is that the show revealed the perfidy of the aliens way, way, way too early -- about 35 minutes into the pilot. That pretty much eliminated any suspense attached to 'are they or aren't they?' and dumped it all on 'what are they up to and how do we stop it?' It's as if the X-Files series finale was its pilot.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
77% of Republicans Have Had Sex with at least One Parent
I see that right-wing US politicians and pundits are now calling Obama's decision not to attend the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall the worst decision of his presidency.
Given that we just got the last 'worst moment' late last week when Obama addressed the conference he was at prior to discussing the Fort Hood shootings, and that I'm sure the next worst moment is only days or even hours away...well, so it goes.
To borrow an old joke, should Obama walk on water, Fox News will use the event to lambaste the President's inability to swim AND his Messiah Complex.
Hidey ho!
Oh, the title was an homage to the Lou Reed anti-Republican song, "Sex with your Parents", btw.
Given that we just got the last 'worst moment' late last week when Obama addressed the conference he was at prior to discussing the Fort Hood shootings, and that I'm sure the next worst moment is only days or even hours away...well, so it goes.
To borrow an old joke, should Obama walk on water, Fox News will use the event to lambaste the President's inability to swim AND his Messiah Complex.
Hidey ho!
Oh, the title was an homage to the Lou Reed anti-Republican song, "Sex with your Parents", btw.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Beware of Exploding Vampires
COMICS:
Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days by Neil Gaiman, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Mike Hoffman, Mike Mignola, Dave McKean and others (1988-2005; collected 2005): I'd imagine that someday soon this slim, over-priced collection of Neil Gaiman's non-Sandman, non-miniseries DC work will be replaced by a larger volume that will also include the missing Poison Ivy piece mentioned herein, the lost-and-found Superman/Green Lantern team-up that was initially meant to be the final issue of the abortive weekly Action Comics experiment of the late 1980's, and Gaiman's recent "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"
As is, this is an interesting volume of Gaiman's American comics baby-step, highlighted by the terrific John Constantine one-off "Hold Me" illustrated by frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean. More for completists than anyone else -- you wouldn't want to introduce someone to Gaiman through this stuff, no matter how interesting I might find the Mike Mignola-illustrated Floronic Man short or the Swamp Thing annual featuring Brother Power the Geek.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity; How the Whale Became by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (2009): This is great metafantasy in any medium. Over the first five issues of the series (which I'm assuming will be collected forthwith), Carey and Gross begin an epic fantasy involving readers, writers, vast conspiracies, children's literature, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein's creature, Internet message boards, the nature of fandom, messiahs, and one confused man who thinks he's the adopted son of the long-missing author of a best-selling, beloved children's fantasy series about a magical boy named Tommy Taylor. The writer apparently named this son after his famous creation. Or did he?
Gross's art is sharp and deft in its ability to shift across the comics art spectrum from cartoony to mimetic and back again. Carey's been writing much-praised comics for more than a decade now, but I think this his best work by far -- his Invisibles, Sandman or Preacher, if you will. Highly recommended.
Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days by Neil Gaiman, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Mike Hoffman, Mike Mignola, Dave McKean and others (1988-2005; collected 2005): I'd imagine that someday soon this slim, over-priced collection of Neil Gaiman's non-Sandman, non-miniseries DC work will be replaced by a larger volume that will also include the missing Poison Ivy piece mentioned herein, the lost-and-found Superman/Green Lantern team-up that was initially meant to be the final issue of the abortive weekly Action Comics experiment of the late 1980's, and Gaiman's recent "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"
As is, this is an interesting volume of Gaiman's American comics baby-step, highlighted by the terrific John Constantine one-off "Hold Me" illustrated by frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean. More for completists than anyone else -- you wouldn't want to introduce someone to Gaiman through this stuff, no matter how interesting I might find the Mike Mignola-illustrated Floronic Man short or the Swamp Thing annual featuring Brother Power the Geek.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity; How the Whale Became by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (2009): This is great metafantasy in any medium. Over the first five issues of the series (which I'm assuming will be collected forthwith), Carey and Gross begin an epic fantasy involving readers, writers, vast conspiracies, children's literature, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein's creature, Internet message boards, the nature of fandom, messiahs, and one confused man who thinks he's the adopted son of the long-missing author of a best-selling, beloved children's fantasy series about a magical boy named Tommy Taylor. The writer apparently named this son after his famous creation. Or did he?
Gross's art is sharp and deft in its ability to shift across the comics art spectrum from cartoony to mimetic and back again. Carey's been writing much-praised comics for more than a decade now, but I think this his best work by far -- his Invisibles, Sandman or Preacher, if you will. Highly recommended.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
When Captain America Sucked AND Blew
Heroes Reborn: Captain America by Jeph Loeb, Rob Liefeld, James Robinson, Joe Phillips, Joe Bennett and others (1996-97): In 1996, Marvel was floundering around somewhat beneath the increasing weight of X-Men mythology and a dearth of 'hot' writing and drawing talent. A lot of that hot Marvel drawing talent had taken off in 1992 when a group of writer-artists -- including Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd MacFarlane, Whilce Portacio and Jim Valentino -- formed their own comic-book company, Image. 1996 saw yet another giant X-Crossover (the Onslaught Event) lead into a quasi-reboot of many of Marvel's core non-X-titles, as Marvel contracted out the production of four titles -- Iron Man, Avengers, Captain America and Fantastic Four -- to most of the creators now at Image.
The basic concept of Heroes Reborn was that Onslaught, a bizarre ultra-powerful amalgam of the minds of Magneto and Professor X, seemingly killed most of Marvel's non-X-heroes (with the exception of Spider-man) in a giant rumpus. However, the heroes were actually reborn in another universe where their adventures could start over again unburdened by continuity. Or X-Men, for that matter. The result, however, was a critically and fanboy savaged group of books that didn't survive beyond the year-long mandate for the test run of this 'new' continuity. A Heroes Return storyline brought the banished characters back to normal continuity, and pretty much everyone agreed to Never Speak Of This Again.
Rebooting continuity-heavy characters isn't an inherently bad idea -- John Byrne's Superman reboot cleared the hero's continuity up for another 20 years, Marvel's Ultimate line (with new versions of familiar characters in their own universe) has produced some notable sales and critical successes, and DC's Silver Age presented shiny new versions of various cancelled Golden Age heroes such as the Flash and Green Lantern. The Heroes Reborn line, though, was plagued by some awfully dodgy writing and conceptualization. Characterization for the 'new' Captain America in these books is almost non-existent.
Some of the grimmer and grittier details show promise (a nearly complete SOB Nick Fury would later be recycled for the Ultimate line), but the book backpedals away from 'mean' Nick Fury as the Reborn storyline nears its conclusion/reintegration with the 'original' Marvel universe. All in all, this is an astonishingly quick read that leaves very little behind in the mind. Frankly, I feel like I just ingested a comic-book enema. Things do pick up a bit in issues 7-12, when James Robinson and a variety of artists took over for writer Loeb and artist Liefeld, but by this point it seems clear that the storyline is simply going through the motions of wrapping up prior to the restoration of the 'real' Captain America and the 'real' Marvel Universe.
As to Liefeld's art...well, Liefeld is probably the most divisive super-hero artist of the last 20 years. He had/has a lot of fans (he couldn't have become hot on the X-books without that) and a lot of detractors. I find his work deeply irritating without completely crossing the line into vomit-inducing, but so far as I can tell, the art here is about as good (or bad) as Liefeld gets. The high cheekbones and teeny tiny legs on every character do start to crack me up pretty quickly. Of often-reliable Jeph Loeb's writing, the less said, the better. This is a pretty good snapshot of the comics industry circa 1996, but I definitely wouldn't recommend paying full price for it.
The basic concept of Heroes Reborn was that Onslaught, a bizarre ultra-powerful amalgam of the minds of Magneto and Professor X, seemingly killed most of Marvel's non-X-heroes (with the exception of Spider-man) in a giant rumpus. However, the heroes were actually reborn in another universe where their adventures could start over again unburdened by continuity. Or X-Men, for that matter. The result, however, was a critically and fanboy savaged group of books that didn't survive beyond the year-long mandate for the test run of this 'new' continuity. A Heroes Return storyline brought the banished characters back to normal continuity, and pretty much everyone agreed to Never Speak Of This Again.
Rebooting continuity-heavy characters isn't an inherently bad idea -- John Byrne's Superman reboot cleared the hero's continuity up for another 20 years, Marvel's Ultimate line (with new versions of familiar characters in their own universe) has produced some notable sales and critical successes, and DC's Silver Age presented shiny new versions of various cancelled Golden Age heroes such as the Flash and Green Lantern. The Heroes Reborn line, though, was plagued by some awfully dodgy writing and conceptualization. Characterization for the 'new' Captain America in these books is almost non-existent.
Some of the grimmer and grittier details show promise (a nearly complete SOB Nick Fury would later be recycled for the Ultimate line), but the book backpedals away from 'mean' Nick Fury as the Reborn storyline nears its conclusion/reintegration with the 'original' Marvel universe. All in all, this is an astonishingly quick read that leaves very little behind in the mind. Frankly, I feel like I just ingested a comic-book enema. Things do pick up a bit in issues 7-12, when James Robinson and a variety of artists took over for writer Loeb and artist Liefeld, but by this point it seems clear that the storyline is simply going through the motions of wrapping up prior to the restoration of the 'real' Captain America and the 'real' Marvel Universe.
As to Liefeld's art...well, Liefeld is probably the most divisive super-hero artist of the last 20 years. He had/has a lot of fans (he couldn't have become hot on the X-books without that) and a lot of detractors. I find his work deeply irritating without completely crossing the line into vomit-inducing, but so far as I can tell, the art here is about as good (or bad) as Liefeld gets. The high cheekbones and teeny tiny legs on every character do start to crack me up pretty quickly. Of often-reliable Jeph Loeb's writing, the less said, the better. This is a pretty good snapshot of the comics industry circa 1996, but I definitely wouldn't recommend paying full price for it.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Boo Radley was a Hero to Most
Inconsequential Tales by Ramsey Campbell (Collected 2007): This was never meant to be a great collection of Campbell's stories, as it's a small-press collection of uncollected stories from throughout his five-decade career. Campbell delivers a typically self-deprecating introduction in which he describes the genesis of each story and his current feelings towards it (usually embarassed or amused). Some of the stories are still better than what most horror writers are ever capable of delivering, and one also gets pretty much all of the science fiction Campbell ever got published in the 1970's. The illustrations don't add much, but this is a somewhat essential collection for any Campbell reader, as one can see his unique prose style developing in fits and starts in the earlier work.
***
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein (Collected 1985): Klein is both a terrific and a terrifically slow horror writer -- we've been waiting for that second novel since The Ceremonies appeared in 1985, and there's only one other collection of short stories (Reassuring Stories) on his resume. This collection of four novellas probably deserves a spot on any 'Best 100 Horror' list. It may even deserve a mention on Great Fiction About New York, as all the stories deal in one way or another with the metropolis H.P. Lovecraft came to hate back in the 1920's.
The four novellas manage to rework some fairly potent 20th-century horror tropes (and specifically Lovecraft-derived tropes in "Black Man with a Horn" and "Children of the Kingdom") into occasionally brooding, occasionally sardonic 20th-century nightmares. "Children of the Kingdom", with its blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Lovecraft's alien Mi-Go, evokes the crime, racism and paranoia of 1970's New York in what could be seen as a brilliant reimagining of Lovecraft's paranoid musings on miscegenation and inbreeding. "Nadelman's God" bounces off Fritz Leiber's seminal urban nightmare "Smoke Ghost" with a new (or is it?) god. "Black Man with a Horn" pits a (fictional) friend of the late Lovecraft's against some of the source material for Lovecraft's malign Tcho-Tcho people. "Petey" imagines an Updikean house-warming party imperilled by a large, gooey something that may turn out to be an unlikely punishment for...real-estate fraud?
Brilliant, witty, creepy stuff.
***
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay (2004): Showtime's mostly enjoyable Dexter series started as an adaptation of the first Dexter novel, though the two Dexter streams have mostly diverged by now. Lindsay's breezy, first-person novel about a serial killer trained to kill only bad people by his cop foster father is an enjoyable page-turner until the last twenty pages or so, at which point Lindsay gets a bad case of sequelitis and decides to keep one villain around who should really bite the dust. Much of the interest of the novel lies in Lindsay's attempts to create a narrator who's essentially Hannibal Lecter trying to be Batman. It all works, sort of, but Lindsay's reductive approach to serial-killer psychology (everyone traumatized in a certain way in childhood will become a sociopath) would realistically leave us with a global serial killer population that should have cut the general population number to 3 billion people by now and falling fast. An enjoyable waste of time, but I don't think I'll be going back to Dexterland anytime soon.
***
The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher (Collected 1962): Boucher was the brilliant co-editor of the influential The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950's and early 1960's before his ealy death from a heart attack. Prior to being an editor, he was a prolific fantasy and science fiction writer himself, and Werewolf collects most of his best work, primarily from the 1940's. "The Compleat Werewolf" is a fairly jolly werewolf novella, in which the typical bloodthirstiness of the werewolf is dropped in favour of a more humourous exploration of what being a wolf with a human mind would be like. Most of the other sf and fantasy stories here operate on the same somewhat amused level with the exception of "They Bite", Boucher's best short story and one of the creepiest horror stories ever written.
***
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein (Collected 1985): Klein is both a terrific and a terrifically slow horror writer -- we've been waiting for that second novel since The Ceremonies appeared in 1985, and there's only one other collection of short stories (Reassuring Stories) on his resume. This collection of four novellas probably deserves a spot on any 'Best 100 Horror' list. It may even deserve a mention on Great Fiction About New York, as all the stories deal in one way or another with the metropolis H.P. Lovecraft came to hate back in the 1920's.
The four novellas manage to rework some fairly potent 20th-century horror tropes (and specifically Lovecraft-derived tropes in "Black Man with a Horn" and "Children of the Kingdom") into occasionally brooding, occasionally sardonic 20th-century nightmares. "Children of the Kingdom", with its blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Lovecraft's alien Mi-Go, evokes the crime, racism and paranoia of 1970's New York in what could be seen as a brilliant reimagining of Lovecraft's paranoid musings on miscegenation and inbreeding. "Nadelman's God" bounces off Fritz Leiber's seminal urban nightmare "Smoke Ghost" with a new (or is it?) god. "Black Man with a Horn" pits a (fictional) friend of the late Lovecraft's against some of the source material for Lovecraft's malign Tcho-Tcho people. "Petey" imagines an Updikean house-warming party imperilled by a large, gooey something that may turn out to be an unlikely punishment for...real-estate fraud?
Brilliant, witty, creepy stuff.
***
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay (2004): Showtime's mostly enjoyable Dexter series started as an adaptation of the first Dexter novel, though the two Dexter streams have mostly diverged by now. Lindsay's breezy, first-person novel about a serial killer trained to kill only bad people by his cop foster father is an enjoyable page-turner until the last twenty pages or so, at which point Lindsay gets a bad case of sequelitis and decides to keep one villain around who should really bite the dust. Much of the interest of the novel lies in Lindsay's attempts to create a narrator who's essentially Hannibal Lecter trying to be Batman. It all works, sort of, but Lindsay's reductive approach to serial-killer psychology (everyone traumatized in a certain way in childhood will become a sociopath) would realistically leave us with a global serial killer population that should have cut the general population number to 3 billion people by now and falling fast. An enjoyable waste of time, but I don't think I'll be going back to Dexterland anytime soon.
***
The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher (Collected 1962): Boucher was the brilliant co-editor of the influential The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950's and early 1960's before his ealy death from a heart attack. Prior to being an editor, he was a prolific fantasy and science fiction writer himself, and Werewolf collects most of his best work, primarily from the 1940's. "The Compleat Werewolf" is a fairly jolly werewolf novella, in which the typical bloodthirstiness of the werewolf is dropped in favour of a more humourous exploration of what being a wolf with a human mind would be like. Most of the other sf and fantasy stories here operate on the same somewhat amused level with the exception of "They Bite", Boucher's best short story and one of the creepiest horror stories ever written.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)